USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), the starship in the original Star Trek TV series

To boldly go where no man has gone before, you'd need a really good starship
- and to launch Star Trek, the pop culture phenomenon that entertained
and inspired millions, you'd need a pretty darned good one! And that is
exactly what the United Space Starship Enterprise delivered. Here are
8 Starship Enterprise facts every Trekker should know:

Before Star Trek, there have been many actual ships named Enterprise.
The very first one of note was a French frigate L'Enterprise, which was
captured by the British Royal Navy in 1705 and renamed as HMS Enterprise.
It served as a British gun ship until it was wrecked just two years later.
After this ship, there were 14 other HMS also named Enterprise (sometimes
spelled Enterprize).

The United States have 8 battleships named Enterprise, including the
first nuclear powered aircraft carrier in the world. The very first one
(before the US became a country, so technically it was a ship of the Continental
Navy) was an armed sloop on Lake Champlain in 1775 named the United States
Ship (USS) Enterprise.

During the American Civil War, aeronaut and scientist Thaddeus S.C. Lowe
built a balloon named Enterprise,
to be used by the Union Army to perform aerial recon on Confederate troops.

And who can forget the Space Shuttle Enterprise? It was the very first
Space Shuttle orbiter, built for NASA in 1976. The Shuttle was supposed
to be named Constitution, but a write-in campaign successfully persuaded
NASA to name it after the Star Trek starship. (Interestingly, the fictional
Starship Enterprise was a Constitution-class vessel - coincidence? Hm....)

The last actual Enterprise hasn't been built yet but it already has a
name: Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise and yes, it's an homage to Star
Trek. It's a suborbital spaceplane being built by Sir Richard Branson
of Virgin for the purposes of space tourism.

Ironically, when Sir Richard offered the first flight to William Shatner,
the actor declined and revealed that he's actually afraid of space travel,
"I'm interested in man's march into the unknown but to vomit
in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with
the vomit hovering over me." Shatner added that he's not entirely
against the idea - he just needed some reassurance. "I do want
to go up but I need guarantees I'll definitely come back." (Source)

2. No Rockets, Jets or Firestreams

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who pitched
the TV show as "Wagon Train to the Stars," didn't tell art
director Matt Jefferies what
Starship Enterprise should look like, instead he told the bewildered art
director what he did not want to see. Starship
Concept Art has reprint of a nifty article in Star Trek: The Magazine
by Jefferies about the design process:

"In my approach to Star Trek I wanted to be as practical as
possible," Jefferies says. "I could tell Gene was serious
enough, but I really didn't know where to start. I knew the Enterprise
was going to be on the cutting edge of the future, but essentially he
gave me the job of finding a shape, and I didn't know what the shape
looked like." Although Roddenberry knew a lot about his ship, he
had never visualized it, and consequently made the situation more complicated
since he couldn't give Jefferies a detailed sense of direction. According
to Jefferies, Roddenberry was absolutely clear to avoid any resemblance
to a 1960's rocket ship. "Gene described the 100-150 man crew,
outer space, fantastic, unheard-of speed, and that we didn't have to
worry about gravity. He had emphasized that there were to be no fins,
no wings, no smoke trails, no flames, no rocket.

In his honor, the crawl spaces on all of the Starfleet starships on Star
Trek are called Jefferies tubes.

3. The Original Name of USS Enterprise

That's
right - the iconic starship wasn't always named USS Enterprise ... in
the original draft, Roddenberry named it USS Yorktown after a World War
II aircraft carrier. The starship was commanded by Captain Robert April,
then Christopher Pike, before Roddenberry settled on James Tiberius Kirk.

By the way, William Shatner was the third choice for Kirk. The role was
offered to Lloyd Bridges and Jack Lord, both of whom declined it.

4. The Origin of NCC-1701

How did the famous USS Enterprise get its registration number NCC-1701
is the stuff of legend. There are conflicting stories, including one where
1701 is a tribute to Roddenberry's childhood neighbor's house number or
that Jefferies got it from the registration number of his airplane.

Here's Matt Jefferies' explanation when he was asked during a BBC
Interview:

NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial
vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It’d been pretty
much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive
for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with
NCC.

The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly
identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused.
I don’t think anyone’ll confuse a one and a seven, or the
zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in
the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one,
the first bird.

5. Land the Ship? Too Expensive, Let's Teleport Everybody Instead!

Originally, Roddenberry envisioned the USS Enterprise to land on various
planets, but it turned out to be too expensive as it would require them
to build expensive sets. The next idea was to use shuttles - but when
filming began, the full-sized shooting model wasn't ready. So, they came
up with the idea of "beaming down" the crew via a teleportation
device and thus the transporter was born! (Source)

In 1994, TIME Magazine interviewed
Star Trek technical expert Michael Okuda about the intricacies of the
transporter:

"It should be possible if we decompile the pattern
buffer."

Transporters can send people instantly from one location to another
by converting their molecules into energy, then reassembling them. Every
living being has a distinct pattern of molecules; the pattern buffer
fixes the configuration by adjusting for the Doppler effect -- the apparent
change in the frequency of the energy waves caused by motion.

"I'll verify the Heisenberg compensators."

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you cannot know
a subatomic particle's exact position and its exact direction and velocity
at the same time. To transport people you have to know all those things,
so the Heisenberg compensator was devised to overcome that problem.
It's an attempt by the Trek writers to signal that they are at least
aware of the issue. And how does the Heisenberg compensator work? "It
works very well, thank you," says Okuda.

6. The Next Gen Enterprise: Hilton in Space

Jefferies
designed the bridge in the original USS Enterprise in the style of a Navy
battleship, with specialized workstations for its crew. When set designer
Richard James updated the bridge for Star Trek: The Next Generation(restriction: no
purple!), Jefferies was asked about the new look. To which he replied:

Gene asked me how I liked the show, and I said that he had taken
the bridge of my ship and turned it into the lobby of the Hilton. And
I have just never watched any of them since. I’m lost.

Ironically, Star Trek and Hilton actually did come together to create
a theme attraction. Star Trek: The Experience opened in 1998 at the Las
Vegas Hilton. It closed in 2008 due to low attendance (though it is due
to re-open in a different location in 2010).

The hull and one nacelle of the original Star Trek Starship Enterprise
model as it was received by the National Air and Space Museum from Paramount
Studios on March 1, 1974. Image WEB11192-2009. Photo: Smithsonian
(with permission)

The model of the Enterprise was sent to the museum in crates, donated
by Paramount Studios five years after the series ended.

The Smithsonian performed extensive restoration to put the starship model
back together, and for the first time ever, the photos of the restoration
process are available to the public at the museum's blog.

The Museum Registrar Gregory K.H. Bryant has more on this behind the
scenes look at the icon science fiction model: Link
- Thanks Llori!

8. The Hot-Rod Starship Enterprise

For his movie Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams decided that the USS Enterprise
could use a face-lift and worked with artists at Industrial Light &
Magic to update the starship - like Roddenberry, he gave a simple directive:

"He wanted a hot-rod type of vehicle, but they also wanted
to preserve the Enterprise kind of look," model maker John Goodson
said in a presentation at ILM's San Francisco headquarters earlier this
month.

"J.J. Abrams kept saying, 'Make it a bigger movie. Make it
a bigger shot,'" creative director David Nakabayashi added. "I
think that's one thing you see in this film, at least: The stuff I've
seen is just everything is big."

SCI FI Wire has the interview with model maker John Goodson and visual
effects supervisor Roger Guyett about the new Enterprise: http://scifiwire.com/2009/04/how-ilm-came-up-with-the.php

The official website for JJ Abram's Star Trek movie has a nifty 360°
panorama of the bridge of the new starship:

-- I freely place this idea in the public domain-- Paramount! this means you can do it...

This can take place in the rebooted universe butthat is not necessary. In fact perhaps a way mightbe found to tunnel between the two universes.

It is 70 years beyond Picard. (Just as Picard is70 years beyond Kirk)

Every room in the enterprise (and most modernstarships) is a holodeck - for the flexibilityit gives. "Computer, remove the bed and replace itwith a pool table (or a swimming pool)"

The Borg have decided to only assimilatevolunteers and are just now beginning to integrate into the Federation. Most Borg have a penchant to proselytize everyone around them for voluntary assimilation.

While no exactly enemies, the Romulans are stillvery territorial and excitable.

After several unfortunate incidents the Klingonsare unhappy with the Federation, with factions callingfor a break away and WAR.

The Dominion have been acting up, making occasional incursions into federation space. The Vorta have beenplaying the role of spy.

Thank you thefluteplayer and Capt Robert April. You two nailed the trekkie/trekker agruement. I've been watching Star Trek since I can remember and I don't feel that time has changed my status of loving the series and the movies (except that abomination of a movie that was ST V). And if Mr Roddenberry says we're Trekkies, we're Trekkies.